In what has become a tradition (doth three times a tradition make?), the first post of the year is to refer backwards to what were my favorite films of the prior one. 2016 was slow to start, but gained an impressive amount of momentum. This particular top ten won't make too much of a splash, although I have an additional list of ten honorable mentions that will follow.

If I were to make a list on the movies that deserve the most accolades or what I believe to be definitively the best, it would of course be different. These movies are simply my favorites for various reasons.

Movies that I meant to see that might have made the list are: 20th Century Women, The Salesman, Aquarius, The Invitation, Yourself and Yours.

Nobody captures youthful charm like Richard Linklater does, and there's a relaxed verve and ease of identity that Everybody Wants Some!! slips into like a well-loved pair of worn converse. There's a reason why so many of us look back to those halcyon college years with such fondness. Linklater utilizes both pitch perfect music cues and an immensely likable cast to explore a time when an amorphous identity was preferred and our invincibility as natural as breathing the air of the summer nights that put the whole world at our fingertips.

Linklater is so good at allowing us to inhabit a space with the people within his frame -- creating both phrases and situations that feel both universally relatable and also intimately privileged. Everybody Wants Some!!, like its characters, wants nothing more than to enjoy itself and to relish a youthful bliss that is only fully realized because we're unaware of its mortality.

What happens when you enter your middle ages and realize that your life is set permanently on a trajectory you decided on long before you understood the consequences? Rachel Weisz and Michael Shannon, both superbly talented, inarguably intelligent, and simultaneously grounded, present opposite sides of that question. One is set in a state of permanent transition and the other is mired in a life that feels just out of reach of happiness. Is the problem that we give up on ourselves too easily? Or is it that we settle too easily?

Joshua Marston weaves a film that is as mercurial as its subject matter, shedding genre skins as the night slips onward. There's something profoundly touching about Weisz' character seeking out Shannon in search of self-identity, and something deeply stirring about the crescendo of frogs that leaves Shannon stripped of words and unease. Coupled with cinematography that is as elusive and translucent as Shane Carruth's work, the conclusion leaves us with a deep sense of peace even in the face of life's uncertainties. ​

There's definitely merit to comparing Hell or High Water with No Country for Old Men, or even The Searchers which is a western concerning cowboys so defined by the past it is detrimental in the face of a world that has grown past them. But Hell or High Water is something elevated beyond a tale of weary outlaws and lawmen. It's a story that is relevant to and completely a product of its context - a debt-ridden and self-reliant state that seems as foreign as a country across the world at times. Whether it's Jeff Bridges stalking through the night with a worn blanket flowing out behind him, or Chris Pine sorrowfully telling his son that the things that will be told about him have truth, we're never completely certain who we want to win...Only that we feel keenly and deeply for them.

In a place that often forces men to take matters into their own hand or subside into a hushed nada nada...it is the sparse connections made that serve as brilliant pinpoints in this film. Taylor Sheridan once again writes a screenplay as nuanced and fuliginous as its characters. There's no guarantee of better days, even with the effort or an acceptance of your past flaws...But there is a sense of doing right by what and who you believe.​

7. The Lobster

Darkly funny, beautifully shot, and an unsettling look at how we view relationships, there really isn't anything more you can ask of a movie. An intriguing premise that somehow delivers on all its absurdity while poking fun at what many of us take for granted, ​The Lobster's two societies offer completely polarizing but equally restrictively damning positions on love.

Maybe it's a reflection on what so many algorithmic statistized dating websites offer to do, or just a highly satirical look on what we believe a relationship offers us. Rachel Weisz effortlessly inhabits the warmest, most natural evincement of a soulmate, making it so easy for us to fall in love with her along with Colin Farrell.

Humor and horror go hand in hand with improbability, but it's a preposterous kind of laugh that's only uncomfortably funny because it's true. There's so much we change of ourselves, consciously or not, to be with someone else. If ever a movie could both be merciless and full of loving humanity, The Lobster is the one.​

6. Paterson

Paterson is Jim Jarmusch's latest about a poet who is a bus driver in the city of Paterson, New Jersey. Each day follows much of the same routine as Paterson, also the name of the bus driver, drives his route, listens in on conversations, sits at a bar at night, and writes poems in a notebook he always keeps with him.

And yet what's so refreshingly incandescent about it is the lack of ennui that we see so much in film today. Paterson is laconically revelatory, unassumingly satisfied, and blissful at expressing itself without worrying what the world thinks of it. Paterson's wife is consistently in a whirlwind of flux from cupcakes to country music stardom, but it's never with a sense of dissatisfaction at who she is. Somehow, instead, it's a full appreciation of her identity. Paterson's art is not meant to change the world or even ever be put in a place that can hear itself. It's as quietly appreciative as the smile on his face as he listens to the conversations of the riders on his bus.

There's a rhythm and sometimes small cadence of life's miracles that often goes unnoticed. Paterson sees twins throughout the movie not as a motivic meaning, but merely because his wife's dream has drawn his attention to a detail in the world. If anything, watching Paterson will hopefully open hearts' eyes to the importance of art and the beauty of the life we inhabit, perhaps even if it's as sparse and haltingly affecting as Adam Driver's voice in the closing scenes.